Science + Chemistry

• • Physical Chemistry
  • Studies chemical systems in terms of their physics, like energy, force, time, motion, thermodynamics, quantum properties, etc.
  • Electrochemistry
  • Looks at the electronic properties, important for developing better batteries
  • Materials Science
  • Trying to create materials with new properties like extreme strength, durability, or self-healing.
  • This is a critical problem with building Earth based nuclear fusion reactors which are reliant on new materials
• Analytical Chemistry

  • Like Detective work, where you have a substance and you need to analyze what its made of, and how much of what
  • Chemists have developed a huge array of techniques to probe and measure different properties of different materials. Traditional Techniques involve wet chemical techniques like precipitation, which separates compounds depending on what temperature they evaporate at.
• Analytical Chemistry

  • Theres a huge array of modern techniques like chromatography, where different compounds move at different speeds through a solution and so separate.
  • Many different kinds of spectroscopy, that can detect materials by shining light on them; or mass spectrometry, where the materials are flung through electric or magnetic fields to separate them according to their masses.
• • Inorganic Chemistry
  • Looks at the chemistry of everything else (non-living things)
  • Most of the chemical compounds studied here are man-made, and the motivation is largely to find chemicals with new properties that can be used in the chemical industry, and the wider world.
• Inorganic Chemistry

  • There are few areas where inorganic chemistry did or does have an influence, for example:
  • Medicine
  • Agriculture
  • Fluids like detergents or emulsifiers
  • special coatings, materials, pigments, or fuels
  • Within inorganic Chemistry, Catalysts are really important for speeding up reactions
  • Blends into Material Science, making solids with novel crystal structures like high temp superconductors
• Organometallic Chemistry

  • Sitting between Inorganic and organic chemistry is organametallic chemistry
  • Looks at organic compounds which are bonded with a metal, and are typically used in reactions in the chemical industry as a catalyst